Lottery games and other games of chance are well known in the United States and abroad. Such games afford states and municipalities an opportunity to raise substantial sums of money without raising taxes. As such they have become an integral part of governmental funding.
Many different types of chance games exist. These games fall into essentially two types: instant ticket games where a player scratches a film off the surface of a lottery card to reveal if the player is a winner and those lottery games where a random number is generated or a specific number is selected by an individual and compared to a number that is subsequently randomly generated at a central office.
The generation of random numbers in lotteries has been the subject of various patents. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,122 to Kreisner describes a random lottery computer. This computer has a random number generation system in it to generate any number of randomly selected numbers. These numbers are then compared to a centrally selected number to determine whether a player has won the specific lottery.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,692,863 to Moosz describes a random number generation apparatus for a lottery game. Again the results of this random number generation are numbers which win a particular lottery.
Other systems have been the subject of patents for the overall lottery system itself. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,689,742 4,494,197 to Troy et al. describes a wagering system having a central processor and various playing consoles which are remote from the central processor. U.S. Pat. No. 4,817,951 to Crouch et al. describes a player operable lottery machine which displays game results.
With the proliferation of numerous chance games including a large number of instant ticket games a market has evolved for lottery machines on which a player can play any number and different chance games to obtain any number of instant tickets relating to different types of lotteries. However, while the numbers played on the lottery tickets themselves may be randomly generated, in current lottery systems the user must specifically select the game to be played. It is therefore an enhancement of existing lottery machine vending technology to provide yet another element of randomness or "chance" relating to the selection of the game to be played itself.